Date: 8/12/2006

I have Co-Pilot installed in the PT and am ready to stall. I wasn’t disappointed. I drove from the dealer to school without a hitch, but as I pulled into the parking lot, I pushed in the clutch so as to drift in the the parallel space. But suddenly I lost power steering! Yes! I had stalled. And Yes! the PT wouldn’t restart. And Yes! I even remembered to push the famous triangle button on Co-Pilot and record all the info.
No true stalls since then. I need to get three or so. And one false stall.
But we’re off to Saxapahaw, a trip which might just get me the next stalls that I need.
More news as it happens.

Just took a couple of questions from a reporter at Business Line (India) about intellectual property as part of the conference build up for the “Owning the Future” Symposium. Sample questions and answers below:

1. What is the relevance of IP rights to the layman – not a scientist or an IT bureaucrat?

Every layman has an investment in IP and in innovation. Not just an upstream investment that provides reduced costs of products and increased speed of innovation, but — as Eric von Hippel details in his 2005 MIT
Press book “Democratizing Innovation” — every purchaser is a potential innovator, a part of the final and unpredictable design and redesign of products. You want to be able to use the hammer you just bought to crack
nuts as well as pound nails. You want to add features to your car or to a skateboard. You also want to add to software, to electronics and to other products and images in ways that the original designer could not have
possibly anticipated. Without legal access to the means of innovation, your choices are reduced or even erased.

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”